This Old Chap Keeps Sending Me Messages About Abortion

I can't get from the cab to the curb without some little jerk on my back. -
Chrissy Hynde of The Pretenders, "In the Middle Of the Road"

The old chap and his and his friends don't have the slightest idea why women go into the gynecology clinic on certain days of the week.

Why? Because it's none of their ever-loving business.

The ladies might be attending for the purpose of a pelvic exam, to allow the gynecologist to take a pap smear, or, perhaps, perform a dilatation and curettage.

Nevertheless, they form human chains of loving busybodies on the sidewalk outside a low-cost gynecological service that is part of a nationwide non-profit chain of such places, hand out white roses, spread collective guilt and misery, distribute literature and pay to have frothy emotional notices placed upon billboards.

How impressive.

Never mind the fact that since one day in 1973 when the U.S. Supreme Court declared it to be so, it has been a matter of utmost confidentiality between a woman and her doctor as to just what is going on in the examination room and the surgical suite.

That was when our Mr. Henry Wade - a law and order Criminal District Attorney from Dallas County who didn't get all that excited when someone blew the President of the United States of America's head off with a high-powered rifle or when a two-bit gangster with a .38 gut shot the man who allegedly did that deed – took on a woman known as Jane Roe for the sake of anonymity because she allowed Planned Parenthood, Inc., to perform an abortive surgical procedure on her.

Naturally, I do not know the details of her pregnancy, but I do know that she was in a wretched state at the time, living in a hot pillow motel on Harry Hines Blvd., and had a list of personal problems that seem to have been astonishing in their scope – to hear her tell it today.

She has been born again, has seen the light, evangelizes long and loudly about her former backsliding ways, and goes by her right name while doing it.

Glory!

I came up in a time when women and their daughters gathered around the dining room table at family reunions and traded lore and news of their acquaintances' lives. When it came to “female trouble,” they glared at any male who happened to wander into their sphere until he stated his business and went galumphing back to the football, baseball, horse shoes, mumbledy-peg match, or hunting and fishing.

Most abortions in those days were called “scraping of the womb,” for that is really and truly what they were. There are other techniques, but unless you're in that profession or up to your knees in some poor darling creature's problems and struggling to help her get out of trouble, it takes a particularly grim mind and a funny way of looking at the world to get too involved in that which is none of one's business.

You know, we are talking about a death in the family.

As it turns out, I have been informed – repeatedly, I must say – that Mr. Chet Edwards (D-Dist.17) is not only pro-abortion, but he has voted to “force taxpayers to fund the performance of abortions overseas and pro-abortion groups that lobby to overturn laws in other nations that limit abortions.” At least, that's one way of putting it.

That is the way the National Right To Life “Legislation Center” puts it.

One wonders if it would be just as appropriate to say that Mr. Edwards voted to keep certain zealous politicians from dictating how the doctors and women in certain foreign countries handle their confidential business or else they will withhold certain loan guarantees or certain items that have a bearing on trade treaties, public health doctrine, or the like.

There are other ominous sounding items such as “Edwards also voted in July 2007 to send millions of dollars to Planned Parenthood, the pro-abortion lobbying group that is also the nation's largest abortion business.”

Would it be just as accurate to say that Representative Edwards voted aye on a certain spending bill that included grants to a non-profit organization that performs gynecological services at low cost for women who have little in the way of health insurance?

Perhaps I'm being too bold, but, after all, I am a farm hand, deckhand, truck driver and rambling man who needs to stay away from the firewater and does not like to see anyone mess with my food or my woman – or anyone else's, for that matter.

They have a national report card marked with x's and o's on how each representative voted on this or that bill or its amendments. Look it up.

The Democrats from our state have mostly o's, while the Republicans have x's. O's mean “they voted against us” and x's mean they voted the way the folks who hand out the white roses, the literature and dispense “sidewalk counseling” to women of child-bearing age as they make their way from the car to the front door of the clinic. But, now, you know, we're talking about how they voted, whether it's with us or against us.

What the hell happened to the woman seeking confidential medical service from her doctor? Does she get a vote? Would she be allowed to tell these – ah – ladies and gentlemen – that she would prefer they just butt out?

I wonder. Oh, by the way, the old boy who keeps sending me the little messages? He was down at the Civic Center the other day castigating mothers for having their kids listen to lectures about such dread sexually transmitted diseases as AIDS and Hepatitis C.

He called it Planned Promiscuity Training and it's okay for he and his buddies to get in peoples' faces and get rude. After all, they're so conservative, what difference does it make?

I asked Ms. Megan Jacobs, who is Mr. Edwards' press liaison officer, to let me have his statement on abortion rights, but she claims she is just way too busy to get involved with all that. I do not wonder that indeed she is. I mean, give me a break.

As I've said before. Jesus wept.

I know that Edwards' campaign workers tell people that he supports the right of a woman to make an informed decision on reproductive matters while in confidential consultation with her physician.

I'm not all that sure, but it sounds a whole lot like what the U.S. Supreme Court said about the matter when Ms. Jane Roe got jerked up and prosecuted by the Criminal District Attorney of Dallas County, Texas, lo, these many years in the misty past.

Now, then, could we talk about all those factories locked up and rusting away in the midwest? How about the truckload after truckload of automatic knitting machinery I hauled out of the Carolinas to ports in Florida, New Orleans, Houston, and Mobile?

Did I hear you say we're running low on water, that our resources are woefully thin if we hope to cope with future needs for human consumption, agricultural irrigation, industrial cooling and manufacturing processes?

Last I heard, it takes Congressional representation by members of the House and Senate who have seniority because, as you know, Article 1 of the U.S. Constitution proclaims that the members of both houses “shall” make their rules and choose their Speaker and their President Pro-Tem and committee chairmen.

If you have a problem with that, you will have to amend the document, though certain “conservative” officials newly minted on a tide of anger and frustration have assured me that the Constitution has “nothing to do with that.”

Thank you for sharing, Dr. Tom Bratcher, Republican Chairman of Bosque County. You know, Dr. Bratcher is a math professor at Baylor University.

But have you really and truly read the document, sir? I wonder.

I don't really care, one way or the other, but I do wonder.

The Cowboys? Nah, it's not the coach.

They just haven't found the right cocaine dealer – yet. Just you wait. Just you wait. He's lurking out there somewhere on Greenville Avenue or in a leafy suburb like Plano or McKinney. He'll turn up. Just you wait.